Local residents look inside a collapsed coastal house in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Vilano Beach, Florida.
Photograph: Chris Wattie/Reuters

Lloyd’s of London slumped to a £2bn loss last year, its first in six years, as the insurance market was hit by a series of major hurricanes and earthquakes.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, along with an earthquake in Mexico, wildfires in California, monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and a mudslide in Colombia, cost the Lloyd’s market £4.5bn in claims, more than double the previous year when it paid out £2.1bn.

The hurricanes, which tore through the southern US and Caribbean last summer, hit Lloyd’s particularly hard because the US accounts for 44% of its business. It said it was its second costliest year for major claims behind 2011.

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He expects 2018 to be another challenging year, and added: “The market’s 2017 results are proof, if any were needed, that business as usual is not sustainable. As a result the market is embracing new ways of working.”

Inga Beale, the Lloyd’s chief executive, said: “The market experienced an exceptionally difficult year in 2017, driven by challenging market conditions and a significant impact from natural catastrophes. These factors mean that for the first time in six years Lloyd’s is reporting a loss.”

The world’s oldest insurance market made a pretax loss of £2bn last year, compared with a £2.1bn profit the previous year. The group’s combined ratio – a measure of claims and costs as a proportion of premiums – worsened from 98% to 114%. A figure above 100% indicates a loss.

Its annual report showed Beale was paid £1.3m last year, down from £1.5m in 2016. Along with other executives, she did not receive a bonus payout under the Lloyd’s performance plan last year because the LPP only pays out if the company makes an annual profit of more than £100m.

Lloyd’s was one of the first UK businesses to publish its gender pay gap, revealing that women earn 32.1% less than men (for bonuses the gap is even bigger at 40.7%).

Beale said she was “not proud of that at all” and that Lloyd’s was taking action, having signed up to the government’s women in finance charter and introduced a back to work programme for parents. Its goal is to have women in 40% of its top management jobs in the next five years, up from 33.8% today.

Women were not allowed into the Lloyd’s underwriting room until 1973, when Liliana Archibald became the first female broker there.

She urged European regulators to agree a solution soon, as transferring the contracts to new entities would be an “unnecessary expense and definitely doesn’t benefit the consumer”.

Transferring insurance contracts would take 12-18 months and involve the courts, according to the Bank of England. It estimates 6 million UK policyholders and 30 million policyholders across the rest of the EU could be affected.